The lower the standard of your team, the more you will appreciate idiomatic code. I don't work in SV, blue chips, or anywhere that could use Scala. A couple of us at my last place had a hard time moving the team from Source Safe to SVN, Git was out of the question. "What's the point of commit messages if you only commit every three months?" - not kidding, not a junior. Lines thousands of characters long, literally. I saw a pattern once. Once. CIO was one of these copy/paste VB devs, common in London, an unfair generalisation, but necessary as a warning sign. Some people become developers without any interest in development, completely oblivious to *nix/open source world, simply as a job, 9 - 5, and might have flipped a coin between development and accountancy. Some places don't give a shit about software development, or the idea of engineering - "just get it done!". Resharper, fxcop? Yeah, right. Degrees don't all teach compiler design, some just Java OO and a bit of Glassfish. If Go replaced C# in all of these arbitrary SMEs there would be far fewer WTFs. But people would struggle without Visual Studio debugging and a big run button. I'm being harsh, and seriously, not suggesting anything about MS devs, who include the world's best as well as the world's worst, but I find people on this site are often, to their fortune, oblivious to what working in the 99% can be like (the figurative 99%). Long live idioms, gofmt, golint.
"..representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning... consciousness is some sort of sophisticated, elegant computation ..." -- But would it love?
I was thinking this comment sounds a bit alarmist and paranoid, and Alex Jones came to mind. Lo and behold, you mentioned von Mises. Racism and fascism are not equivalent to the holocaust. Even apartheid era South Africa was not equivalent to the holocaust. There are many degrees of shit between happy and holocaust.
That presumably also explains why this post has rapidly vanished off the front page, unlike the cats in boxes story. I know, someone will tell me it's algorithmic.
Indiscriminate down votes have to be met with indiscriminate up votes. What a daft situation.
Edit: Ah! That also explains why explanatory comments aren't required for down votes - preferential control. I didn't realise how rigged this is.
I was thinking something less obviously encrypted than a usb stick with a dialog box saying "Enter password" - how about steganography? "A password for my image?"
Would I be right in suggesting that it's not encrypted data unless someone can decrypt it to prove so? In other words, we're free to send garbled nonsense to each other.
I have no interest in ball games. I enjoy Formula 1, some MotoGp, and some some cycling. My interest in Formula 1 used to be primarily strategy, but not anymore and I'm not sure when it changed - maybe refuelling, or moving everyone onto the same tyres. There's is nothing cultivated about my disinterest in ball games. If I did have an interest in football/soccer then I would cultivate a disinterest because I wouldn't support something so regularly in the news for corruption. My first live football/soccer game was one of the biggest let downs of my life - I sat there dumbfounded that anyone could be interested. I found the live games look better the further up I sat in the stands, and the bigger the stadium, but still no interest. I went to a rugby final something or other (Wasps vs Leicester?) and fell asleep. There is no chance of me following them just to have small talk with someone, I can work around that.